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Personalization in Action

By Mauricio Valdez Mendia - Microsoft for Walmart LATAM
Chief Transformation and Digital officer

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By Mauricio Valdez Mendia | Chief Transformation and Digital Officer - Thu, 09/29/2022 - 10:00

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Organizations are trying to leverage or create marketing and data capabilities that enable them to communicate with their customers on a personalized level. Delivering personalized content helps customers engage with a brand on a more profound level and increase their loyalty.  Enabling personalized communications with one’s customers does not compete with institutional or traditional marketing and communication efforts; those should be maintained.  Customers want to experience their personal interpretation of a brand, obtaining information of the specific products and services that they have previously bought, are likely to buy or are interested in getting information from.  

To deliver personalized experiences, five key elements are necessary: 

  1. Omnichannel integration

  2. Customer 360° view

  3. Segmentation capabilities

  4. Cloud marketing enablement

  5. Experimentation platform

Omni-channel integration: This is the organization’s ability to deliver its products and services in both physical and digital environments, and have them share information, process and systems. These environments are orchestrated in a manner in which the experience for its customers is frictionless. Customers can decide to purchase something in-store and have it shipped to their home, with the ability to track their shipment through the company’s app or website. All shipment information is integrated regardless of where the purchase took place.

A Customer 360° view: This requires the organization to gather customer data across all touchpoints throughout the various customer interaction journeys. The concentrated view of demographics, contact information, transactional and business-specific data is called a Customer 360° view. Its purpose is to provide an aggregated view of a customer in which the viewer could within 90 seconds know the customer’s past experiences with the organization.

Segmentation Capabilities: Using the data set from the customer 360° and creating some extra synthetic variables (variables that are the result of applying calculations/transformations to original raw data entries), customer grouping or clustering is enabled and such clusters can be defined after a certain set of characteristics or behaviors. It is important to understand that a given customer can exist in various clusters, so having the ability to prioritize is fundamental.

Cloud marketing: This is a business’ digital marketing efforts, in which campaigns can be launched using digital direct marketing and digital channels Enabling the capability of delivering content through email, website, push notification, SMS, social media, among others, using an orchestrated platform enhances communications capabilities. Tracking specific customer communications to a specific customer is facilitated and, therefore, traceability of such communications is possible.

Experimentation platform: An experimentation platform integrates end-to-end customer behavior from receiving communications to purchase/usage. Having the complete picture of what incentives, communications and rewards a customer has been exposed to has presented a challenge, but actually measuring the real impact in sales has escaped organizations.  While there are various offers that provide some attribution models, they are just mere approximations. It is only possible within an organization with end-to-end traceability, from communication to customer purchase/usage through the Integration of received communications, open communications, clicked-on communications, to purchase/usage.

Let’s take an  in-depth look at the proposed Experimentation Framework detailed in figure 1 

1
Fig. 1 Experimentation Framework

 

Phase 1 

Market analysis and customer intelligence: This activity will serve to create an overall understanding of key business variables: average ticket, average number of purchased items, frequency in between use/purchase, channel participation, market share, etc.

Phase 2

Opportunity detection: In this activity, specific customer behaviors are prioritized and targeted through communications and incentives. The size of the experiment and its control group are defined here:

Experimentation design: definitions of where the communication/ incentive/ promotion will occur.

  1. Communication channel: SMS, push notification, social media (and which), email, etc.

  2. Campaign length and specific timing of communication (consideration of institutional communications and business seasonality must be taken into account)

  3. Number of customer touches

  4. Incentive: discount/promotion/coupon

Segmentation and clustering: Quantifying the actual number of customers that have specific behavior defined in opportunity detection, eliminating all entries that are in other experiments. This guarantees that a customer will not participate in more than one experiment simultaneously.

Phase 3

Content design: The creation of visual content, subject, headers, etc.

Unitary testing: A mock test is launched to specific individuals inside the organization.

Phase 4

List loading: A customer list is uploaded to the marketing cloud tool with all the specifics about the campaign.

Quality check: Content is reviewed in various platforms like different mobile phones, different browsers, different operating systems, etc.

Activation: Campaign is activated and communications sent.

Phase 5

Data insights and reporting: This includes all cloud marketing KPIs complemented by transactional and usage information from other companies systems, delivering an integrated end-to-end view of the customer journey after targeted.

Enabling experimentation capabilities that are customer- and data-driven enhances organizational capabilities to allocate resources with real ROI results. While attribution models will continue to deliver information about upper funnel and lower funnel attribution approximations, an experimentation framework will help eliminate the approximation and land factual data. It is within the organization’s reach of obtaining a 360 degree view of the result of all its targeted communication efforts, through the integration of its transactional data. 

Photo by:   Mauricio Valdez Mendia

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